Into the Country to work:
this article is about the economic activities of the Indigenous people in barkerville.
The indigenous participated in many different types of production through out the year such as hunting, fishing, gathering, farming, and raising children, they also exchanged their labor as opportunities presented themselves. There was also indigenous, cattle driving, berry picking, and prostitution in early barkerville. It was argued that Indigenous people although living in and around barkerville during the gold rush were ultimately absent from the mines and towns and were only “economically active in the region of hinterland” (pg 3) in 18562 however indigenous participated actively in the gold rush.
Indigenous people seemed to be written out of a lot of early documentation of the gold rush with people using the excuses that diseases killed them off before miners had even come to exist in those areas.
I found it interesting that Indigenous people seemed to be written out of history and the gold rush, and when reading about history they used the excuse that disease killed off all the indigenous before the miners showed up however in previous articles we have read we know that not to be true, although European disease did kill a lot of people it did not completely erase the entire group of indigenous people from Canada.. the question that continued to run through my head well reading this was did the miners honestly think that just by neglecting to document that there was indigenous people in the mines that later on in life we would just believe that they had all been killed off by disease? Because if they hadn’t been killed off by disease, which they weren’t, then indigenous people would continue to have children and pass on their history just as the Europeans and miners did.